St James the Less, El Greco, 1610-14
Museo de El Greco, Toledo, Spain [Web Gallery of Art]

Instead, the wisdom which comes from above is pure and peace-loving. Persons with this wisdom show understanding and listen to advice; they are full of compassion and good works; they are impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow peace reap a harvest of justice.
– James 3:17-18 (Christian Community Bible)

San Pio da Pietrelcina (Padre Pio) celebrating Mass

The Spirit of God is a spirit of peace. Even in the most serious faults He makes us feel a sorrow that is tranquil, humble, and confident. This is precisely because of His mercy.
– St Padre Pio, Capuchin Friar and Mystic (1887 – 1968)

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
– Helen Keller

All revolutions are spiritual at the source.
All my activities have the sole purpose of achieving a union of hearts.
– Vinoba Bhave, Apostle of Nonviolence (1895 – 1982)
First recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, for Community Leadership, in 1958.

We realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced.
– Malala Yousafzai’s speech at the Youth Takeover of the United Nations

We live by faith. We can be so used to living according to our faith that we can forget that faith is God’s gift to us, just as we often forget that our own natural lives are ours only by God’s free gift. We can believe, trust and obey God and submit ourselves totally to Christ as our Lord and Savior only by the grace of God.
– Faith is God’s Gift. Faith and New Evangelization, 2 February 2013

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.  It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, Presidential Address, 16 April 1953